The thrill of the game: Why are people drawn into conspiracy theories?

It’s the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration as US President, and conspiracy hives around the world are abuzz with news of his imminent arrest as part of a military coup. As usual, details are vague and sources unnamed. Yet online conspiracy feeders gobble it up, believing Biden’s arrest – for “illegal dealings”, or something – will lead, somehow or other, to Donald Trump’s return as leader of the free world.

And why wouldn’t they?

Trump told them repeatedly that he was the greatest president ever. And, despite everything, they believed it. He told them the US election was “stolen”, and they should march on Capitol Hill in protest, and they believed that, too – with fatal consequences for five people.

Now, just hours before Biden is due to be sworn in as America’s 46th president at 3.30am on January 21 (AEST), self-proclaimed “Truthers” are once more united in their belief that this is conspiracy movement QAnon’s promised “Great Awakening” or “The Storm”, when Trump will expose a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophile cannibal liberal elites, and that Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris will never make it to the White House.

“There’s millions of us who hope [martial law] will actually start tomorrow,” I’m told by veteran Australian conspiracist Jeni Edgley the day before it’s all supposed to happen. “Some believe Biden will be arrested as he is inaugurated … Trump wants to cause the least amount of damage to the military and the American people. That’s why everything has been kept under wraps.”

Like others who buy this stuff, Edgley (once married to showbiz tycoon Michael Edgley) sounds thrilled to possess information at odds with what she scornfully calls “The Narrative” – meaning pretty much everything the rest of us accept as factual.

At 70, the anti-vaxxer and former natural health practitioner lives in retirement in North Queensland. Although I tell her I’m interested only in how she came to be a believer, she soon swamps my phone with the type of videos she recycles ad infinitum via her social media feeds. Most are from extreme right or religious sources in the US, and include the usual QAnon rants about mass murders committed by the Clintons; the COVID-19 “conspiracy”; Michelle Obama’s secret life as a transgender male; “proof” of how the US election was stolen … and so on.

I ask Edgley if I can call her again around the time of Biden’s inauguration to talk about whatever’s happening. She agrees, but points out that she’s been advised via a “10-second clip from some military person” that because of “worldwide social media censorship”, and the distortions of mainstream hacks like me, Trump will be launching an alternative broadcasting system to tell people about the coup.

“We’re all supposed to switch to this emergency system worldwide,” she says. “So you and I may not be able to call each other.”

That night, watching eerie scenes of the empty US Capitol in security lockdown, I’m torn between confidence that nothing will happen, and concern (based on televised repeats of the insane Washington riot just a fortnight earlier) that anything could happen.

Edgley’s first message, opting out of our planned chat, arrives at 8.30pm. An hour later, she elaborates: “Hi Frank, There is SO much going on … I’m receiving a post a minute from all over the world. I’m loving seeing all the complexities of different viewpoints and don’t want to miss a moment … I don’t want to be sharing this time (I’ve waited for over 40 years) with a serious journalist! … I just want to ‘be’ with it all.”

Edgley isn’t sure when the military coup will unfold, but suggests Trump’s farewell speech earlier in the day – “The movement we started is only just beginning … the best is yet to come!” − is a likely pointer to what’s about to happen. “TO THAT EXTENT,” she concludes, “I WON’T BE AVAILABLE FOR CALLS TONIGHT.”

To my horror, she sends another raft of fact-free videos: a bald English charlatan spruiking the sale of gold and silver; a Fox News “exposé” involving China; predictions of soaring death rates from COVID vaccinations, and something Edgley labels “the selling of aborted baby parts illegally”.

By 4am the following day, Biden and Harris have been sworn in without incident, and I go to sleep soothed by a classic by the Scottish band Del Amitri that could serve as QAnon’s theme song:

And nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all
The needle returns to the start of the song
And we all sing along like before…

Much later, I find a message Edgley sent at 4.45 am: “Yes, I was up all night … devastated. Can’t believe nothing happened … such a corrupt group of individuals back in power !!!!!! The tentacles run deep! … I don’t believe a word of their ceremony … [they] said all the right words [but] I’ve seen [too] much about them from Hunter Biden with his ‘crack pipe’ and having sex with his niece to Michelle Obama being a transvestite. Signing off … exhausted and saddened.”

Another message that afternoon says she’s been in touch with lots of other Truthers equally stricken by the failure of “good” to prevail over “evil”, presumably by destroying the world’s largest democracy before their eyes. But she watched a couple of old conspiracy videos and felt a little better – “or have we all been sucked in … as I believe you feel we all have …”

After that, with her question yet unanswered, Edgley goes to ground – “fasting and meditating”. It’s almost three weeks before I hear from her again.

None of this orchestrated craziness is new to me. When I was a kid, my father – a conspiracy theorist all his adult life – became convinced a man camped in scrub near our house had been sent to murder him by fiendish Jewish plotters for One World Government. (He turned out to be just a lonely man with a ready ear for conspiracy theories.) I’ve written before about the toll Dad’s mania took on our family (“My Father the Fascist”, Good Weekend, March 8, 2019). Yet even in his wildest imaginings I doubt that FNick, as my brother and I called our war-damaged father, could have envisaged what conspiracy theories would look like by 2021.

Waves of corrosive bullshit lash the planet, driven by the unholy confluence of internet, Trump and pandemic. Fear, aggression and monumental stupidity conspire to swamp science and reason; truth and accuracy are shouted down by people who think facts are “points of view” and that watching YouTube propaganda videos is research.

“If I trust the scientist and you trust the guy on YouTube,” says Roland Imhoff, a social psychologist at Germany’s Johannes Gutenberg University, “there’s no common ground between us. And having a shared understanding of reality is essential to society. Without it, there is no truth any more. That’s a huge danger.”

“Having a shared understanding of reality is essential to society. Without it, there is no truth any more. That’s a huge danger.”

Long before the web gave credible scientists and credulous YouTube researchers equal access to global audiences, FNick was evolving and pushing his favoured theories – Jewish plots, Holocaust denial, anti-vaccination, anti-fluoridation – in the old way. An experienced journalist, he read a lot (in support of what he already believed), communicated by mail with obscure right-wing bookstores and fellow believers, addressed public gatherings and plagued newspaper editors with the racist, anti-science screeds that clattered almost daily from his typewriter.

FNick died in 1987, aged 93, still fighting to spur a then largely indifferent world to action before it was “too late”. Most of his awful beliefs survived, as they had for centuries before him, and have now been given comic book touches for the social media crowd. Dad was a societal outsider: bombastic, contrary, distrustful of governments and scornful of all opposing views.

Most of these traits, along with anxiety, depression and impulsiveness, are emerging through research as indicative of the modern conspiracy mindset.

“[Studies show] up to 80 per cent of people now believe in at least one conspiracy theory,” Dr Mathew Marques, a lecturer in social psychology at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, tells Good Weekend. “They usually involve a group of malevolent people having covered something up, although there’s no evidence of that having occurred.”

Increasingly, Marques suggests, committed conspiracists tend to “interpret any and all events as part of some conspiracy … when they don’t find evidence of the thing they believe in, they just move on to the next thing … the current level of scepticism [over science and established facts] is just off the rails, off the charts.”

Of course, lots of things in the world aren’t what they seem to be: vested interests influence wars, economies and elections; politicians and governments lie and cheat in the name of expedience. But this has little to do with the current crop of conspiracy theories, which seem more like part of a mental contagion than shared concern over actual wrongs or injustices.

Some identify the contagion as QAnon itself. The movement began in 2017 with a series of posts from an anonymous user on the message board 4Chan. Claiming to have a level of US security approval known as “Q clearance”, the user signed off as “Q”. By a process too asinine to dwell on, this reportedly led to today’s QAnon: essentially a pro-Trump propaganda machine, built around its own inaugural lie about Trump fighting a heroic war against a network of child-trafficking Democrats and Hollywood elites. QAnon’s cryptic, coded fabrications are now feverishly “interpreted” by legions of devotees. Perhaps coincidentally, the movement gained ever wider audiences as sections of the global media abandoned actual news gathering in favour of propagandised “entertainment”.

Why do grown people take this stuff seriously? Even more perplexing, why do they keep believing when – time after time – the conspiracies and their authors fail to be publicly “revealed” as predicted? In a lot of cases, believers seem unaware they’re being politically manipulated, or lack even a basic understanding of the political divisions involved.

After ploughing through hours of Australian social media feeds, my feeling is that conspiracies have become a sort of global, online “game”. Some get involved because it suits their beliefs, but others play the game because they like the idea of themselves as “independent thinkers” who see through the deceptions fed to “sheeples” and “normies” by corrupt governments and scientific institutions. This isn’t a story about the theories themselves, but an attempt to understand how people are drawn into their thrall.

Illustration by Sam Bennett.Credit:

Businessman Emmanuel Goubert was in his 20s and attending business school in France when the scales of conventional belief began falling from his eyes and attaching themselves to giant, bloodthirsty lizards. “If you’d told me [before then] that the world was controlled by an elite that controls all the wealth … and that these guys are actually of extra-terrestrial origin, and that their … god is a demon, and they do a lot of sacrifices of kids, and blood rituals, I would tell you, ‘Man, just go back in your box! I don’t want to hear it!’ ”

He’d have thought they were crazy?

Goubert: “Oh, 100 per cent!”

And now?

“Now I [know] the real lie was the lie I was living in since I was born, which is so huge and so disgusting …”

Goubert, 32, moved to Australia from France eight years ago. He lives with his partner on North Stradbroke Island, near Brisbane, where he operates an import-export business from their home at Point Lookout. He’s intelligent, good looking, polite, well-travelled … and absolutely committed to outlandish conspiracy theories.

His core belief is that the world has been controlled for thousands of years by shape-shifting aliens. They live underground and follow what another writer has called a “marvellously slow” plan for the ultimate enslavement of humanity.

“They are called draco reptilians. They are from three to four metres tall, can weigh up to 200 kilograms, and they feed on fear and blood,” Goubert explains gravely. “They are the mosquitoes of the universe.”

“They are called draco reptilians. They are from three to four metres tall, can weigh up to 200 kilograms, and they feed on fear and blood.”

Apart from the lizards, this sounds strangely familiar. I tell Goubert how my father believed in an ancient Jewish plot to enslave humanity through a crippling system of “false debt”.

“Yes,” he says. “That is correct.”

It turns out that Goubert’s space lizards are aided and abetted by Jews, who are the wealth-controlling elite he mentioned earlier. FNick’s old favourite has been rejigged over the years, largely by mega conspiracy spreader David Icke, a former soccer player and BBC sports presenter who was banned from entering Australia in 2019. On social media, Icke has variously blamed Jews for the pandemic, linked it to the 5G mobile network, claimed that COVID-19 can’t be transmitted via physical contact, and played down the infectiousness of viruses in general.

On his public Facebook page, Goubert reposts daily updates from extreme-right sources, including the pro-Trump “Enemies of the People” movement. He tells me he’s from a “traditional” French family in Bayonne, and that his geologist-teacher mother and builder father support and share his beliefs. He provides their names, and the name of his Australian partner, but later insists that only his name, in a reduced form, be used in this story. He says even he wouldn’t have spoken out in the past through fear he would be ridiculed, or “have an accident tomorrow and just disappear from the planet”. (Using his full name in Facebook posts doesn’t seem to trouble him.)

Belief in extraterrestrial visitations apparently came to his “spiritual, meditating” father long before Goubert himself embraced the reptile plot, largely through his membership of Gaia – a streaming service that focuses on pseudoscience, yoga, conspiracy theories and alternative medicine.

“When my father was young, he and his sisters saw UFOs above a property in France,” he says. Much later, when Goubert told his father he’d come to believe the world was controlled by aliens, and that he feared he was “going crazy”, his father confessed to having reached a similar conclusion years earlier. (He’d kept it to himself through fear of ridicule.)

“All of the true stuff is ridiculed,” says Goubert, echoing one of FNick’s recurring laments. (I remember our mother actually running away when he was laughed at while banging on about The Plot in public.) “People just laugh about it,” Goubert tells me. “They tell us, ‘It’s all just bullshit, har, har, har!’ And the har-har-har is the biggest weapon that has always been used to stop people seeing the truth.”

His reaction has been to cut himself off from all credible news sources. This began involuntarily in 2001 when his father, outraged by the media “spreading fear” about the Twin Towers terrorism attack, seized the family’s only TV set and threw it into the street. Goubert, who thinks terrorism is “another agenda from the New World Order”, insists he hasn’t used any conventional news outlets since that day. He’s somehow aware, though, that all the news he misses is “manipulated” by aliens via their Jewish lackeys.

“There’s a lot of disinformation on the internet, but when you know where to look, it’s incredible.”

Goubert gets most of his information from Gaia, YouTube and other internet sources, and the rest from books with “spiritual” or extra-terrestrial themes recommended within his online “community”. He thinks almost everything taught in conventional schools is alien lies, and estimates that since he turned to conspiracy theories, roughly 90 per cent of those he considers friends are people he hasn’t met in person.

“There is a lot of disinformation on the internet,” he concedes, adding, “but when you know where to look, it’s incredible. It has allowed people to open their minds and be receptive to new possibilities faster.”

Goubert has opened his mind to most QAnon fabrications, including the claim that COVID-19 was deliberately created (with its vaccines set to kill more people than the virus itself) as part of “a strategy to get less people on the planet and then control them all”.

He sees himself and fellow believers as “soldiers” for the cause, and seems genuinely confused by the difference between fact and fantasy. “Younger people are really open to all this [conspiracy] stuff,” he enthuses. “And [because of] all these alien and hero and superpower movies, when you start talking to them about the possibility of having aliens on the planet, these guys are already saying, ‘Yeah, of course. Why not?’ ”

Illustration by Sam Bennett.Credit:

Among Australia’s busiest spreaders of QAnon material is a 60-something couples counsellor who calls herself the “Love Coach”. The description sits oddly on her public Facebook page above hateful rants accusing legally innocent people of crimes including mass murder, paedophilia, political assassinations, embezzlement, treason, sedition and drug dealing.

And that was just on a single day during the pre-inauguration conspiracy frenzy, when she shared a series of baseless claims – “From a Marine at CIA headquarters” – against the Clintons, George Bush snr, Barack Obama, Dick Cheney and others. Since then, she’s maintained her daily habit of sharing propaganda, especially fear-mongering anti-vaxxer themes, almost hourly with her 1900-plus Facebook followers.

No fan of the established media, which she calls “treasonous … brainwashed, blackmailed scum”, the Love Coach nonetheless boasts on her website of having promoted her services via the ABC, 2UE, 2GB, the Daily Telegraph and Cosmopolitan magazine.

When I phone her at her NSW home, she agrees to discuss how she became a conspiracy theorist but only if her name isn’t used. I tell her that wouldn’t make sense because she’s already using her name to publicly accuse people of serious crimes.

LC: “So you’re actually using real names?“

Me: “Of course … And real facts.”

LC says it would be dangerous for her to use her name because US authorities are shutting down social media sites if people even “mention anything like anti-vaccination … I seem to have got away with it on Facebook for some obscure reason.”

Me: “You’re worried about your privacy, yet you’re happy to accuse people of murder on a public forum?”

LC: “Yeah, I’m completely happy to suggest that somebody has been paedophiling [sic] children and committing heinous crimes … when there’s enormous amounts of proof around.”

Me: “What sort of evidence do you need before sharing this stuff?”

LC: “I need about five bits of information from top level sources … [such as] people who have access to M16, CIA, umm – white-hat stuff, Q stuff which has access to military intelligence.”

She suggests that if the “utterly biased” mainstream media wanted balance, it would regularly allow Truthers to comment on issues of the day. “Truthers,” she adds, “is a better word than conspiracy theorists because they’re not conspiracy theories, they’re conspiracy facts, most of them.” She insists that, “along with all the other Trumpers”, she is just a private person who “really believes in the truth”.

Me: “Do you believe the US election was stolen?“

LC: “Without a skerrick of a doubt, yes.”

“Truthers is a better word than conspiracy theorists because they’re not conspiracy theories, they’re conspiracy facts, most of them.”

Me: “OK, well I think the reality is there’s not much hope for you. But thanks anyway.” A few minutes after the call ends, the Love Coach fires back in a text: “You’re obviously not very skilled at building trust – a valuable asset in these days.”

A curious side effect of the Age of Conspiracy is the unlikely bedfellows it creates. Such as the romance between Australia’s “alternative” hinterland-dwellers, once inclined to the left, and former federal Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly, a climate change denier and supporter of some QAnon positions. Central to this peculiar alliance are Kelly’s promotion of unproven COVID therapies on social media and his appearance in a podcast hosted by controversial celebrity chef and anti-vaxxer Pete Evans.

Fervent conspiracy theorist Pete Evans, the chef, plans to run for federal politics.Credit: Getty Images

In keeping with the beliefs of many latter-day hippies, who also tend to be among the most fervent conspiracy theorists, Evans calls COVID a “scam” and a “fake pandemic narrative”, and eulogises Kelly as a “beautiful and beyond-courageous man”.

Kelly quit the Liberal Party in February after being rebuked by PM Scott Morrison for posting misinformation about COVID on social media. He now occupies the crossbench.

Banned from Facebook in December for repeated violations of its misinformation policies, Evans’ plan to run for federal politics has apparently been fuelled by his devoted following among conspiracists.

Global health authorities are troubled by the extent of misinformation about COVID vaccines, and are countering with online fact sheets about the immunisation process and gee-ups from prominent people. “Research teams are also looking at ways of trying to train people to identify misinformation through things like online games,” says social psychologist Mathew Marques.

“They show how people use conspiracy theories and other forms of misinformation for gain and profit. Hopefully, this kind of research can be expanded to schools … because the concern is that this sort of thing isn’t going away anytime soon.”

Jeni Edgley is a fan of both Kelly and Evans. In the ’70s and ’80s, she and impresario Michael Edgley were the power couple of Australian show business. They ran the multimillion-dollar entertainment business, Michael Edgley International, owned a series of mansions in Perth and Sydney, drove a yellow Rolls, hung out with the rich and famous, and captivated the media.

“Jeni Edgley has deep brown eyes, dark circles under them, and a cheeky smile,” ran a piece in The Australian Women’s Weekly in 1981. “She is instantly likeable. She talks and smokes furiously and is as down to earth in her conversation as in her clothing.”

She qualified as a naturopath in Sydney, parted from Michael in the late 1980s, and started her Hideaway Health Retreat in the Gold Coast hinterland soon afterwards.

Intrigued, even then, by fringe beliefs, she hosted “Nitty Gritty” days at the retreat, where guest speakers lectured on UFOs, yowies, the Loch Ness monster, lost cities, the JFK assassination, and the sins of the medical establishment. “In my knowledge,” Edgley told a Good Weekend writer in 1996, “there are three people who have come up with cures for cancer which were banned because they didn’t fit in with medical orthodoxy.”

Edgley tells me she was so disturbed by what she heard at the Nitty Gritty lectures, she began storing food in fear of a societal breakdown. One lecture was about the spread of paedophilia, “Which I’d never heard of!” But later, after watching “thousands of hours” of conspiracy videos on the theme, she accepted QAnon claims about Trump fighting a global child abuse ring.

“I’m not saying I … agree with everything Trump’s done, whether it’s [grabbing] pussies or politics, but I do like that he’s done some stuff nobody else had the guts to do.” Trump, she adds, “always reminds me of my ex [Michael Edgley] … I mean, in that money is his life, and deals and negotiations and all that sorta stuff. So I know his sort of character.”

By the time Edgley calls me back after the Big Fizzer on January 20, conspiracy tragics have moved their deadline for Trump’s return as president to March 4. (When, yet again, nothing happened.) They’re also reposting claims that martial law and the Insurrection Act have already been invoked, and that Biden isn’t really president. Does Edgley still believe this crap?

“Yes,” she says, without hesitation.

“Oh, Jeni,” I groan. “Surely not!”

“If it isn’t true,” she demands, “how come Biden hasn’t been seen on Air Force One? And how come military people are turning their backs and not saluting him?” (Writing of the conspiracist mind in the London Review of Books last October, British novelist James Meek counsels against arguing with believers: “You’re faced with a choice between challenging limitless errors one by one, or denouncing an entire edifice of belief … It’s like a forest fire that can only be put out one square inch at a time, or all at once, and so can never be put out.” )

“I told my son I was frightened [the authorities] were going to come after me and he laughed and said, ‘Aww Mum, you’re a little old granny living in North Queensland. Get over it!’ ”

Which is a pity. Because the AWW was right: Jeni Edgley is likeable. When she isn’t plunging down mad rabbit holes. “Listen to that beautiful storm!” she hollers at one stage, pacing the garden with her phone as a thunderstorm rumbles in. I even like that she still smokes – an outrageous habit for a health adviser, alternative or not, yet in keeping with her maverick disposition. At times, she even manages a nod to the absurdity of conspiracist thinking. “I told my son I was frightened [the authorities] were going to come after me [for reposting conspiracy theories],” she recalls. “And he laughed and said, ‘Aww Mum, you’re a little old granny living in North Queensland. Get over it!’ ”

But will she? Will Emmanuel Goubert, the Love Coach and all the other believers ever get over the lizard monsters, killer vaccines and sinister ex-presidents that move about in their thoughts like squatters in unsecured buildings? Large numbers of them seem to genuinely believe that what they’re doing will help bring about a sort of heaven on earth.

My father often used a Biblical quote to invoke his vision of how things would be after he’d helped to save the world from The Plotters: “But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid...” (Micah 4:4). The new reality, of course, is that when it comes to making people afraid – of ethnic differences, democratic processes, once-trusted institutions, even one another – nothing does the job like an online conspiracy epidemic.

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